The Counter-deception Blog

Hard to put a spike through this story. Eventually someone will get around to the “what did they know, when did they know it” puzzle and finish what Clark, Anonymous, and others have begun.

Chris E adds: My favorite part of this story is that the five people who "remembered" something that happened 5 years ago so distinctly rember it differently from each other.

come to think of it, I remember a neighbor, or perhasp a co-worker, who worked on this (or something just like this, was it John Poindexter? Bob Popp?) and had similar issues about US persons data. No, wait, that was my DHS project, where we were offered DHS data but had to turn it down. well, whatever. anyway, I remember it distinctly.

Remember where you were when you first learned of 9/11? (and don't say in an elementry school room teaching reading). good. what did you have for breakfast that morning? ok, not fair. what did you do the day before? ...

CQ Today September 9, 2005

Weldon Says Witness Will Tell Of Destroying Data About Potential Terrorists By John M. Donnelly, CQ Staff

A Defense Department employee will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 21 that civilian superiors in 2000 ordered him to destroy a huge cache of data from a classified program that tracked al Qaeda, a congressman said Thursday.

“Another witness will testify that he was ordered to destroy 2.5 terabytes of data related to Able Danger and al Qaeda,” said Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., referring to a now widely publicized “data-mining” program that gathered information about people from a host of sources to establish links and patterns that would not otherwise come to light. The amount of data obliterated is equivalent to 125,000 trees made into paper and printed, or a quarter of the print volumes in the Library of Congress.

“He was ordered to destroy the data or he would lose his job or go to jail,” Weldon said of the Defense official, whom he did not name. “What were their motives? I think we have to find out.”

News of the coming testimony about the destruction of Able Danger data is the latest development about the controversial and once-classified program. Five people who were connected to Able Danger said the program identified Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, as a potential threat more than a year earlier. Weldon and some of these people also said the Defense Department did not share with the FBI what it learned about al Qaeda as a result of Able Danger prior to the attacks.

“We have identified the FBI employees in the Washington field office who arranged three meetings [with Able Danger personnel] that were canceled,” Weldon said.

“It was a very serious breach not to pass that information on and to have it shared,” said Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., in an Aug. 31 statement about the Pentagon’s withholding of Able Danger information from the FBI. “The consequences of not identifying them was that 9-11 might have been avoided.”

Because the destruction of Able Danger data occurred prior to both Sept. 11 and the 2005 disclosure of Able Danger’s existence, no one suggests the data was eradicated to cover up what the Pentagon knew about al Qaeda. But senior members of Congress from both parties are determined to learn why the Pentagon would destroy a massive trove of information about terrorism when it was even then a critical concern of U.S. national security agencies.

Destroyed Data

Pentagon officials acknowledged at a Sept. 2 briefing that they destroyed the data. They said it was done as a matter of routine to protect the identity of “U.S. persons” — citizens and those who were visiting the country legally.

But Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, an Army intelligence officer who worked on the program, said Thursday that before the Able Danger data was destroyed, he had briefed senior officials in the Pentagon and White House on ways to excise U.S. persons’ names without losing the entire database. He said the Pentagon must have obliterated the data for another reason that it is not disclosing.